The plastic bag outrage is only the beginning

By Roqayah Chamseddine

23 August 2018 — 12:00am

The outrage over plastic bags is typical of how customers behave.Credit:Peter Rae

You're standing in the middle of a queue at your local supermarket, you're in a rush, and you watch on in annoyance as the cashier slides products across the scanner. Every slow ding makes you clutch your trolley so tight that you can feel the handle digging into your fingers.

Then, just when you're hoping for the line to get a bit shorter, the cashier starts up a conversation with the patron at the front. So you decide, your body twitching with fury, that you'll let that employee have it. Maybe you'll tell them how ridiculous it is that you had to wait a gut-wrenching five minutes.

You have places to go, things to do. After all, you could have been staring at a row of $200 pots at Myer and taking a break from locking eyes with cooking equipment so you can block the aisles with your trolley. You yell out a few expletives and then you're on your merry way.

This happens far too often, and it's the service workers who suffer the brunt of it for days afterwards. The recent furore over plastic bags has led the public to believe abuse of supermarket workers is an anomaly.

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It is not.

A Woolworths employee has described how the bag ban took to a whole new level the abuse from customers that he routinely receives for long queues, self-checkout faults and general store issues.

“I don't know whether it was [customers] not being able to use the bags they'd had before, or that they had to purchase these newer bags, but they'd find a way to pin the blame on someone there working in the store,” he says

He went on to say that if the lines were long during peak shopping hours there would be at least one person who would pull up into the queue and lambaste him or other workers for “being slow”.

“This is something that really gets me upset,” he says. “A human being can only go so fast, and when, for example, [a customer] comes through the line with a product that has no tag on it and I can't find it in the system then I have no choice but to wait for a colleague to help.”

The union's research subsequently led to the No One Deserves A Serve campaign, calling for customers to be mindful of their behaviour and the environment that these workers are navigating each day. Some of the testimonies given to the union included acts of sexual harassment and direct physical abuse. “I have had customers throw products at me for simple things, such as a product is out of stock,” one testimony reads.

“I’ve had my face spat in, slapped across the face and had one person throw a punch at me and miss (I dodged it). It becomes second nature to know how to defend yourself, even when you’re just selling groceries and providing an everyday service.”

As someone who has worked in the service industry back in the United States, I can assure you that this behaviour cuts through borders. The old adage that “the customer is always right” has been embedded so deeply into the way in which these industries operate that workers are often forced to stand there and cop the abuse for fear of administrative retaliation.

It's my own experience working in retail that has led me to speak up whenever I witness it, because while the cashier or stocker may not be in a position to respond, I am.

If I even catch a whiff of the overly dramatic huffing and puffing that some customers do when they're made to wait in a line I make sure to verbalise my solidarity to the cashier because, at least for a moment, they can hear an expression of empathy from someone who's been where they are.

Customers are being led to believe that their role as consumer makes their behaviour, no matter how abusive, permissible. The rise of the five-star rating across service industries has also given consumers a feeling of power.

The only way to remove that power is to chip away at it, and make your fellow customers understand that you won't stand there and watch them dehumanise these workers.

Not a single employee cares that you mask your abuse with talk of "how long" you've been a Coles customer. The store has been open since 1914. There's no reason you should be tossing all common sense and empathy out the window because you're doing some shopping.

So, either practise some patience and compassion or at least stay away from shopping in person.